Social Media Guru’s Weekly Checklist

/in , /by

Checklists can help you make sure that everything that needs to be accomplished within a given period gets done. As you’ll see below, a social media guru has a lot to do each week to maintain guru status.

Social Media Guru’s Weekly Checklist

Weekly

  • Check your stats
  • Engage with influencers
  • Engage with partners
  • Weekly goals check-in
  • Hold a strategy session
  • Attend events – chats, hangouts, etc.
  • Update your social media ads

Check Your Stats

In terms of what to check when it comes to stats, there are many, many options.

The Buffer blog has a great introduction to social media stats, as well as a weekly social media report you can create for sharing with your boss, client, or team.

This tip from Finola Howard is also really great:

Measure what’s worked. Note your best-performing posts in a spreadsheet or other file so you can reference later as you hone your content.

What makes for a best-performing post? That can be totally up to you, depending on the stats that matter to you.

Engage with Influencers

Influencers are people with either a large following or a verified status or an important role at a significant company. Reach out to those outside your circle, particularly any influencers in your industry or niche.

In the past, I’ve identified a few people who I was wanted to connect with, added them to a Twitter list, then went about the weekly task of checking out their updates and engaging when appropriate. The goal, ultimately, is to build a relationship and connection—and in a lot of cases it works, if given time.

Engage with Partners

Engaging with partners involves staying in frequent connection with your competitors, colleagues, and friends.

Weekly Goals Check-in

Often times, along with checking your stats on a weekly basis, you can quickly peek at how your stats fit with the goals you’ve set for social media. Here’re a couple of ways we do this at Connect4 Consulting:

1. Per-post basis

I know that we’ve got a certain benchmark in mind for a successful post, so I’m able to quickly see if we’ve reached that goal by peeking at the per-post stats (for instance, one benchmark is 200 clicks per tweet).

2. Longer-term goals

At other times, we’ll set a bigger goal to aim for over time, and we’ll use what’s called a waterfall graph to chart our progress.

Credit goes to the team at HubSpot for giving me this cool idea. Here’s how to make a waterfall graph for yourself:

If you’re using Excel, create a table with the following columns:

  • Date: Dedicate a cell to each day in the month.
  • Weekday/Weekend: Label each day as a weekday or weekend day.
  • Daily Actual Visits: Plug in the number of visits you actually get each day.
  • Cumulative Actual Visits: Add that day’s actual visit number to the number of visits you’ve gotten so far that month.
  • Daily Goal Visits: At the beginning of the month, plug in your daily visits goal, depending on whether it’s a weekday or weekend.
  • Cumulative Goal Visits: At the beginning of the month, sum your daily visits goal day over day.

Here’s what it might look like:

daily-traffic-waterfall.png

Each morning, plot your progress by plugging in the actual visit number from the previous day and adding it to the traffic you’ve earned over the month in the “Cumulative Actual Visits” column.

Next, create a graph from this spreadsheet to create your daily leads waterfall graph. First, hide the “Weekday/Weekend” column by right clicking on the column and choosing “Hide.” Then, highlight the rest of your data, including the titles of your rows and columns but excluding the “Total” row that’s at the bottom. Click the “Charts” tab at the top and choose “Line” and then “Marked Line.”

You should see a graph that roughly resembles this one:

daily-traffic-waterfall-excel.png

From there, you can add a title, label the lines, and change other visual elements.

Hold a Strategy Session

It always helps to step back and reflect.

Some cool strategy exercises could be reviewing what went into your social media marketing plan in the first place, i.e. your goals and purpose behind social media. Or answering some of these questions:

  1. What do we hope to achieve with social media?
  2. Are we on the right networks to connect with our audience?
  3. How does our voice/tone convey our brand?
  4. In what ways can we be most helpful to those we serve?

Attend Events

Here’s a huge list of possible chats to participate in:

list of possible places to look:

Update Your Social Media Ads

Depending on the depth of your commitment and involvement in social media ads, this one could easily be a daily to-do item. If you’re running just a few ads, then weekly could be a good frequency to start with. Check and refresh your ads. Keep the ones that are working. Iterate on the ones that aren’t.

Social Media Guru’s Daily Checklist

/in , /by

Sometimes it helps to have a checklist to make sure that everything that needs to be accomplished within a given period gets done. As you’ll see below, a social media guru has a lot to do each day to maintain guru status.

Social Media Guru’s Daily Checklist

Daily

  • Reply to everyone
  • Check your mentions
  • Monitor social media for keywords and phrases
  • Schedule your updates for the next day
  • Check out other social media profiles
  • Curate content to share
  • Advocacy: Make it easy for your team to share
  • Engage with MVPs
  • Follow back those who follow you
  • Connect with one new person

Reply to everyone

If you can reply to everyone who engages with you on social media, you are doing better than 75% of the brands on social media. So first and foremost—and on those days when there’s just tons going on, perhaps the most important to-do item of the day and the one we’d recommend for sure making time for—reply to everyone. Reply as quickly as you can, given all else you have happening.

Check your mentions

This is one layer deeper than replying to everyone who engages with you on social media.There are a few quick and easy spots to visit to find these:

Monitor social media for keywords and phrases

This great list from Bufferapp post on social media monitoring covers many of the basics of what to monitor on social media.

Brand or company monitoring

  • Your name or your brand’s name (e.g., Buffer)
  • Any variations of your brand’s name (e.g., Buffer and bufferapp)
  • Potential misspellings of your brand’s name (e.g., bffr, bufffer)
  • Names of the most active/visible members of your company (e.g., Joel Gascoigne, Leo Widrich)
  • Mentions of specific campaigns you’re running (e.g., #bufferchat, #bufferpodcast)
  • Your catchphrase, slogan or tagline

Industry or topic monitoring

  • Key words or phrases that describe your industry or interest (For example, at Buffer I might want to monitor for key phrases like “social media sharing,” “social media posting” and “social media automation” to start out)
  • Key words or phrases related to or complementary to your industry or interest
  • Frequently used industry hashtags

Schedule your updates for the next day

Here are some best practices. I’d highly encourage you to test and experiment with what works best for you!

  • Post three or more times per day on Twitter
  • Post 2x per day on Facebook
  • Post 1x per day on LinkedIn
  • Post one to two times per day on Instagram
  • Post five or more times per day on Pinterest
  • Post two or more times per day on Google+

Check out other social media profiles

On Twitter, this can be done quite quickly with a daily visit to one or more Twitter lists.

On Facebook, you can add other pages to your Insights reports. To do so:

  1. When logged in as the page admin, click Insights from the top of your Facebook page.
  2. Scroll to the bottom of the Insights page, and you’ll see the “Pages to Watch” section.
  3. Click the blue button to Add Pages.

Curate content to share

Part of a social media sharer’s day is likely to include finding fantastic content to share.

Advocacy: make it easy for your team to share

LinkedIn found that employees are 70 percent more likely to click, share, and comment on an update than a typical LinkedIn user.

This brings up the idea of advocacy: Encouraging your team to share your content and advocate for your brand.

In practice, this can be as simply as adding a daily checklist item of emailing the team with a new blog post of yours or recommending a tweet to RT or favorite.

Engage with MVPs

Come up with a list of MVP fans or followers, or key people who regularly evangelize your brand. This could be a list of top users, influential people in your industry, folks you’d love to get to know, etc.

Focusing on brand advocates is a popular way to go here, as you can multiply yourself to a degree by encouraging others to share about you. MailChimp co-founder Ben Chestnut has a great way of explaining and showing this process of flipping the funnel upside down.

Follow back those who follow you

1. Follow everyone!

Return the favor for all those who follow you on social media. This can be quite straightforward on sites like Twitter and Instagram. For other networks, you can add people to circles on Google+, accept all connections to your LinkedIn, and follow a user or an individual board on Pinterest. On Facebook, pages can “like” other pages.

2. Follow those who fit with your focus or niche

Some people and brands choose to follow a bit more strategically by connecting with those who share common interests. With this, you can browse through a new follower’s bio or timeline to see if their social presence meshes with yours and then decided whether or not to return the follow.

Connect with one new person

Connecting with someone new can fall in quite smoothly with re-following, replying, and engaging.

The idea behind this item is to practice making one-to-one connections with the people in your audience, welcoming new followers with a personal message or reaching out to someone you appreciate or admire.

And there are some fun ways to do this quickly and easily: Say hi, share a GIF, or go the extra mile with some surprise and delight.

Big Update to Google Photos Today – You Can Now Share Albums

/in , /by

There’s a big update to Google Photos today. You can now share albums.

The feature allows friends and families to collaborate on photo albums. Google Photos users can subscribe to albums and receive notifications whenever an image is added to the album. You can also send out invites for collaboration, as you can with Google Docs.

Google also added the ability to label people on your albums. These labels can be customized, so you can call your friends and families by nicknames if you prefer.

You can also now finally use Chromecast to cast your photos to your TV. And you can also cast Google’s animated GIFs to your TV.

The features are launching on Android this week, and will arrive on the Web and iOS a while later.